Dell Focused On Flexibility with Latest PowerScale Updates

Dell Technologies is tackling the management of unstructured data with several updates to its Dell EMC PowerScale NAS solution.

Dell says the enhancements provide more flexible consumption, management, protection and security capabilities to eliminate data silos.

New PowerScale hybrid (H700, H7000) and archive nodes (A300 and A3000) deliver up to 75% more performance than comparable hybrid nodes. They also deliver up to twice the performance of comparable archive nodes, the company said. This completes the refresh of the Isilon product line that started last year. This began with the release of the PowerScale all-flash F200 and F600 nodes and continued with the announcement of the PowerScale F900 all-flash nodes.

New PowerScale OneFS and DataIQ software enhancements expand storage management, performance monitoring, auditing and compliance capabilities to simplify file storage at scale. This delivers an improved user experience for large scale clusters and UI enhancements for ease of navigation, says Dell. It also has​ the ability to run reports to analyze volumes by time stamps.

Elsewhere, there are enhancements to Dell’s API-integrated ransomware protection capabilities, with cloud deployment options in addition to on-premises.

There is now also Dynamic NAS Protection available with PowerProtect Data Manager. This delivers enhanced backup for file data enabling up to three-times faster backups and up to two-times faster restores.

Flexibility to Manage Unstructured Data

David Noy, VP of product management, unstructured data solutions, Dell Technologies, announced the updates in a blog Wednesday.

Dell’s David Noy

He said an “uber” trend in file-based storage is the need for flexibility. It must support a mix of enterprise file-based workloads, demanding workloads such as AI/ML/DL or traditional uses like file consolidation and archives.

“Whether it’s managing demanding GPU or public cloud workloads, retaining critical data at the lowest cost, or protecting data from cyberattacks, enterprises need a storage infrastructure that provides a supporting management and protection strategy that can handle the most demanding and critical data-rich file workloads, without creating storage silos. Your scale-out file storage solution needs to consolidate your unstructured data into a single data lake where it is easy to keep the data connected, managed, protected and secure, ready for the most demanding enterprise workloads,” wrote Noy.

He said organizations need “a supporting management and protection strategy that can handle the most demanding and critical data-rich file workloads, without creating storage silos.”

Scale-out file storage needs to consolidate unstructured data into a single data lake, he said. This is “where it is easy to keep the data connected, managed, protected and secure, ready for the most demanding enterprise workloads.”